The article mostly presents some ideas on the current state of business blogging (that’s sorta what we do). I love this quote:

Blogging for business is about converting attention to value. You have to earn the attention, and then you have to deliver that attention to a potential opportunity to drive value.

I like it so much that I’m writing a whole blog post about it. Some thoughts:

“Blogging for business…” When you write a blog post for your library, you are blogging for business. Blogging for your organization. It means you have to develop a reason behind what you write. Which moves us to the next point.

“… is about converting attention to value.” Yes, there’s a reason we blog for our libraries. It’s not because we are good people, or because we like to share. There needs to be a more strategic reason to do it, or it’s really not worth anyone’s time. So keep reading …

“Earn the attention.” This idea isn’t all that hard. To gain attention, do this: write well, write in an easily readable, conversational style. And share stuff your customers are actually interested in.

Oh, and actually share it somewhere (most likely on your Facebook Page – wherever you have a large gathering of customers).

“Deliver that attention to a potential opportunity to drive value.” Huh? Another way to say that is to move readers to a next step. After reading, what do you want the reader to do next? On a library blog, that next step could be any number of things, including:

check something out

visit the building

attend an event or class

find out something new about the library (i.e, “we have ebooks!”)

register for something

etc.

We are not businesses, so we don’t sell stuff. But it’s easy enough to translate that idea of “delivering value” or “selling stuff” to what we do as libraries. The “value” we deliver is information, knowledge, learning, and improving people’s lives.

Want to improve your library’s blog? Set some strategies and goals for your blog, deliver a next step in everything you do, and start measuring your successes.

Here’s my one big social media prediction for libraries in 2017. Are you ready?

It’s this: Your social media won’t improve … if you don’t try to make it better.

If you are guilty of any of these things:

Saying “yes, we’re on Instagram/Snapchat/The Next New Thing” [now I can check it off my list].

You don’t “get” Twitter/Snapchat/Facebook/etc … and don’t make an attempt to figure it out.

You read bunches of books and blog posts, but don’t make any changes.

You over edit/over analyze to the point of not really posting much.

You don’t post much on your social media channels, then say “yeah, our patrons don’t really want to friend a library.”

Don’t have any goals for this year.

etc.

If you are guilty of the things above, then your social media channels probably won’t improve.

Thankfully, this is a really easy fix. Sit down with your team, department, boss, library director, favorite colleague – and do 30 minutes of planning. Look at your analytics (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Youtube all have useful analytics) and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Then, create some goals. They might even be simple ones, like growing your customer base or posting consistently. It might be slightly more ambitious, like setting a goal of more engagement for each post. Or maybe connecting what you do in social media with a library-wide goal.

But easy or more difficult, you will have goals. And you can easily work to meet those goals. And my prediction will be wrong.

Please – make my 2017 prediction NOT come true! Instead, set some goals, figure out how to measure them. And then do the hard work of making your library better – one social media post at a time.

One tip that struck me was this: “Post in Snapchat style.” The author says this:

Snapchat is a community that has developed its own style and language. Keep it short, fun, designed in the snapchat style (stickers, filters, text and drawings over images … you’ll start to see the trends) and interactive.

That makes a lot of sense, of course. You wouldn’t want to act like a grown-up on Snapchat – that’s just be weird!

But this made me think – is there a “posting style” to the other social media channels we use, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.? And do we need to adapt our content to those posting styles?

I think so. For example, videos on YouTube work best when you immediately jump into the content – no introductions needed. Twitter is obviously short and sweet.

This could (eventually) also mean that you create a unique posting style for your content, and stick to it. For example, you might develop a certain “style” of photos on Instagram (that’s a best practice, by the way), and try to share photos and videos using that same style structure.

I’m at Internet Librarian 2016 (20th year for this conference – wow!) this week, learning lots of cool stuff. I’m taking notes, and will probably do a couple of summary posts of highlights I’ve picked up.